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Barn Boy Furniture |
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by Shawna Galassi
Furniture maker Jeff Sauer cannot pass a dilapidated barn without stopping.
Where others see a pile of boards destined for the dump, Sauer sees wood aged with beauty that has outlived its usefulness in one form and is ready to take on another. He uses wood salvaged from old barns and farmhouses to build bookshelves, cabinets, coffee tables, bureaus, and anything else that strikes his fancy. “There’s a soulfulness to the cycle,” Sauer said. “The wood served its purpose as one thing, and now it has a new purpose.”
After Sauer hauls home a pile of discarded boards, he sorts through them, selecting those with the most beauty, and then he artfully turns them into custom made pieces of furniture that are both functional and soulful. “Because the wood is so beautiful to begin with, my main job is to not screw it up,” Sauer said.
After he paints each piece, he sands the furniture so that the wood shows through. “I want it to look like it sat out on the back porch in Iowa a couple of hundred years,” Sauer said. While the weathered look gives each piece a casual, carefree look to it, Sauer said he goes to great pains to make it look that way. Despite all the painstaking effort and attention to detail that goes into each piece, the hardest part comes once the job is completed when he has to relinquish his labor of love. Sauer said during that moment of truth when a customer looks over a piece he’s just delivered, he secretly harbors the hope they won’t like it so he can keep it for himself. The problem is, they always love it, leaving him to cry all the way home.
“It’s a strange thing to create something and not keep it,” Sauer said. “I know more about it and what went into it than the owner will ever know.” As Sauer works on each piece of furniture, he said the entire time he’s carrying around the memory of finding the boards and thinking about the stories behind them. The boards might have been the floorboards of an old farmhouse that generations walked on or they might have been a part of a barn that sat in the sun for hundreds of years. Whatever the story, Sauer said, “It has so much more soul than if I went to 84 Lumber and got a stack of new wood.”
In addition to using reclaimed wood, Sauer uses paint and finishes rescued from the dump and hardware found at estate and garage sales, leaving him with little more than the occasional hinge to purchase retail.
Sauer wasn’t always the skilled craftsman. Up until five years ago, the 48-year-old had never built so much as a bookshelf. His transformation from marketing director for a company to craftsman with his own furniture business came about after a divorce in which his wife took the bookshelves. Unable to find a replacement bookshelf to his liking, Sauer’s friends encouraged him to build one himself. Initially he scoffed at the idea. Then one day while riding his bike along Buckley Road in San Luis Obispo, he came upon a collapsing farmhouse. “It was such old, beautiful wood,” Sauer said, “I thought, ‘Maybe I could build shelves out of something like this.’”
Sauer returned for the wood, then with a hammer and handsaw from his garage and a handful of old nails, he built his first bookshelf. “When I finished that first bookshelf, I was so proud,” Sauer said. “I still remember looking at it. I felt more pride looking at that stupid bookshelf than I had in years working for that company.”
After more encouragement from friends, Sauer decided to start his own furniture making business, and within eight months of his first bookshelf, Barn Boy Furniture was up and running. In that time, Sauer’s built in the neighborhood of eighty pieces, each one “built to love, built to last.” As Sauer put it, “If you’re going to have stuff, you might as well have stuff that matters.”
For more information and pictures of Sauer’s work, go to www.barnboyfurniture.com .
Shawna Galassi is a regular contributor to HopeDance. She can be reached at galassi4@charter.net .
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